Viul

Secret Recess

Somewhere along the same slightly lo-fi, hazy ambient aesthetic lies a new album by Luke Entelis, a New York-based artist recording under the moniker Viul (pronounced ‘vell’). He’s previously appeared on Past Inside the Present imprint (I guess we’re label mates!). I’ve also premiered a piece from his collaboration with Benoît Pioulard from Konec, released by A Strangely Isolated Place in 2022. For Secret Recess, Entelis reaches into his arsenal of analogue synthesizers, guitars, and tape machines to create a spacious, slightly muted, soft-hued ambient decadence, reflecting on memories of the past and projections of the future. “Some pieces feature delicate melodies curling over themselves, while others offer gradually evolving loops underpinned by subtle guitar plucking, distant found sounds and obscured voices at half-speed. All are crafted meticulously with analogue sources and sifted through soft-edged tape processes that reward a dedicated headphone session, conjuring the solitary space promised in the album’s title.” Traces of previous experiences imprint their own familiar taste on how we undergo this moment, and there are moments in Viu’s new work on Dauw that trigger some of those for me. “Taurum”, in particular, carries me through that early electronica era, yet somehow it undeniably exists only now. I actually can’t possibly explain it in words. And this is where this music speaks its best. Mastered, again, by Taylor Deupree, this little gem can be purchased on vinyl, along with a cassette edition of Viul’s unreleased Green Corridor EP.

zakè & Benoît Pioulard

eve

I suppose this is turning out to be a Sound Bytes column featuring some exceptionally blissful calm. I swear, it was not my original intention to group them this way. But I’ve set these beautiful albums aside to catch up on when the time was just right – when it’s quiet and early in the morning and the city’s asleep. The weekend is perfect for these meditations, especially at 5 am. On this late-in-the-year release on Zach Frizzell‘s personal-work sublabel he calls Zakè Drone Recordings, we find him collaborating with, you guessed it, Thomas Meluch again, and it’s a perfect three-piece long-form excursion into textures, timbres and tones. “eve arose from more than a decade’s worth of sound fragments, recovered and arranged into harmonic strata like photographs in a family album. For each chapter, zakè crafted the sonic bedrock from these remnants, and Pioulard added varying orchestrations of tape-processed guitar, voice, dulcimer, melodica, and synthesizer.” I love all the tiny details embedded within all these single progressions – from the rustle of the fire in the cold and dark corner to the crackle of the needle on the calmly spinning disc. The track titles on the album reflect the quiet and long nights in December, “where fleeting moments of peace manifest in visible exhalations and crystalline silence.” Mastered by James Bernard in his Ambient Mountain House, the physical version of the album is sadly sold out. But hey, you can get the entire digital discography at 90% off! I just checked, and Past Inside The Present is also running an 85% sale! Oh, and one last thing – be sure to also check out Zakè’s latest album, Lapis, released on January 17th, 2024, via quiet details.